Sometimes, creative ideas snowball in a spectacular way.

Consider bestselling author (and Norwich native) Wally Lamb’s latest work, which will be released in November.

What has become a novel titled “I’ll Take You There” started out as a small app project for Metabook, a new digital book platform.

But it kept expanding as inspiration blossomed. Lamb heard stories that the Garde Arts Center was haunted. He learned that a female director helmed the first silent movie to grace the Garde’s screen. And, along the way, Lamb brought into the mix Felix Funicello, the 10-year-old at the heart of his 2009 novella “Wishin’ and Hopin’.” In this case, though, Felix has grown up. He is now a 60-year-old film professor who runs a movie club on Monday nights at the Garde — which is haunted by ghosts of movie stars past.

This all coalesced into “I’ll Take You There,” which will be released as an app by Metabook on Nov. 20 and then in traditional book form by HarperCollins on Nov. 22. Lamb spoke to The Day last week about the project.

Let’s start at the beginning: Lamb had met Ken Siman, who’s now the publisher and editor of Metabook, back in 1992 when they were each promoting their own novels; Lamb’s was “She’s Come Undone,” and Siman’s was “Pizza Face.” Recently, Siman asked to meet with Lamb to tell him about his new venture, Metabook, and how the company was going to “bring reading to life with all these new applications,” Lamb says. He showed Lamb a prototype — a new Metabook app version of John Berendt’s 1994 novel “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”

“I just loved what they did with it. So I said, 'Yeah, I’ll give it a shot,'” Lamb says.

The subject he decided to work with was the Miss Rheingold contest. It was a publicity event in which the public voted on which woman would be featured in advertisements as “Miss Rheingold” for the Brooklyn-based beer Rheingold. The competition started in the 1940s and continued until folding in 1964 in the face of feminism and racial unrest. (All the potential Miss Rheingolds were white.)

The contest has long been an interest of Lamb’s, and readers might remember its turning up in his novel “The Hour I First Believed.”

The “I’ll Take You There” story developed from that and from the fact that, Lamb says, he “got involved once again with my Funicello characters from ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’, the family that sort of evolved from New London stories and the old lunch counter down by the train station.” (Lamb told The Day in 2009 that, in developing the Funicellos’ business, he asked friend Harry Mantzaris to reminisce about the lunch counter his family ran in 1950s New London that Lamb described as being "sort of like ‘Cheers’ without the beer.”)

Lamb says of “I’ll Take You There,” “This little novel is very New London-based.”

Which brings us to the other New London angle: the Garde. When Lamb attended the premiere screening of the film adaptation of his “Wishin’ and Hopin’” at the Garde Arts Center in 2014, he chatted with Steve and Jeanne Sigel — who are, respectively, the venue’s executive director and its marketing and development director.

“They happened to mention there had been quote-unquote ghost sightings. So I took it and ran with it,” Lamb says.

He delved into researching the Garde itself, learning that, after it opened in the 1920s, it was a vaudeville house and showed silent movies.

Every intriguing subject seemed to lead to another.

“You know how you get on the Internet, and one door opens the door to something else, and before you know it, four hours are gone?” Lamb says.

In his conversation with the Sigels, he learned that the first movie screened at the Garde was a silent film directed by Lois Weber.

“I thought to myself, ‘Gee, a woman director back then?’ That’s pretty rare these days even. Then I found out that she was a real mogul in the industry and that indeed a lot of the silent films were written and directed by women,” he recalls.

Weber became a character in “I’ll Take You There” as the primary specter haunting the Garde — albeit haunting in a friendly way. And she’s not the only apparition.

“We’ve got the ghost of Ingrid Bergman who floats in, and Billie Dove, who was Lois Weber’s big star,” Lamb says.

These phantoms have the ability to send Felix back to his previous life via magical movies. If Felix steps up on the stage and touches the movie on screen, he can time-travel back to earlier eras.

Lamb enjoyed writing about Hollywood icons of the past and a little bit of movie history, as well as telling a story about feminine roles and feminism. “I’ll Take You There” touches on the latter in terms of not just trailblazers like Weber but also modern-day women. Lamb’s editor suggested he look at current feminism as it’s embraced by women in their 20s. In response, he created the character of Felix’s daughter, a 20-something writer for New York magazine who’s assigned a retro story about the old Miss Rheingold contest.

“It’s still a family story,” Lamb says. “You see some of the same characters you saw in ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’.’ But you also have the older, wiser, sadder, adult Felix to play off some of those early memories.”

As Lamb’s original notion morphed into a novel, HarperCollins became interested in publishing a print version.

“I know there are a lot of people who are resistant to the app — you know, reading electronically — so I wanted to make sure my more traditional readers would have their crack at the book, too,” he says.

Lamb has been quite involved in developing the app with Metabook’s creative team.

“As we say here in New England, it’s been wicked cool for me to take part in it,” he says.

Among the features are Lamb giving a tour of the Garde and talking about the book’s development; a short documentary on Lois Weber; and an audio drama based on the story. Of the latter, Lamb says they’re looking at “some recognizable names from movies and TV” to take part.

Since the book is rife with pop culture references from various eras, Metabook creative director Benjamin Alfonsi and Lamb considered doing a virtual museum of then and now. That idea transformed into a gallery with three floors, with one each focusing on the icons of Hollywood; the American woman; and politics and pop culture.

“You can, with your finger on the screen, rotate 360 degrees around each of these floors, so it’s like you’re walking through an actual museum or gallery,” Lamb says.

Also part of the app: A virtual jukebox featuring songs referenced in "I'll Take You There" or that have some relation to it. Janis Ian, who is a friend of Lamb’s, provided what he describes as “this really beautiful acoustic version” of her classic “At Seventeen.”

The virtual jukebox will also boast a poem by Lamb’s son who is a successful slam poet in New Orleans and who travels the slam circuit all over the country. Included, too, will be a version of the Staples Singers song that gives the book its title.

Lamb says he thought narratively but also in a multimedia way when creating “I’ll Take You There.”

“I wrote it as a novel, but, about halfway through, I began to think in terms of songs and the movie stuff. It was fun to pull in all these other media as I was creating the first draft,” he says.

The app will be distributed and sold exclusively through the iTunes app store and will work on Apple products such as iPads and iPhones.

A quick note on other projects related to Lamb: Oscar-nominated actor Mark Ruffalo is developing, with Lamb, the author’s “I Know This Much is True” with the idea that it would air on a premium cable channel. Ruffalo would star as twin brothers. Lamb declined to discuss more details about that yet.

And Lamb thinks it would be interesting to bring the Metabook experience to the anthologies written by the women at the York Correctional Institute in Niantic, where he has been running a writing workshop since 1999. Lamb, who edited those books, is also “in the deciding stages” of whether to do a new anthology.

For now, though, Lamb fans can look forward to “I’ll Take You There” and its innovative app.

“You can take side trips if you want, and then other people will just want to read the story, the text. That’s cool, too,” Lamb says. “But there are all these other options that are available. I hope that people who like to read books will do that and be satisfied with that. But also I hope that people will experiment a little bit.”